It’s not some Halloween gimmick. And she’s not a ghost, exactly. But this week is the two-year anniversary of my sister’s death by suicide. The other day was her birthday. She would’ve been 39. She would’ve hated this birthday, because she despised the idea of getting older. A smoker, she constantly fought the wrinkles that formed around her mouth and asked me about which wrinkle creams I used, a reminder I was eight years her senior.
“It’s fair,” my best friend and baby sister constantly joked with me, tossing her long blonde locks and batting her perfectly made-up eyelids over stunning blue eyes, “that you got all the brains, and I got the looks.” I’d always reply, “Someday, your looks will fade, and I’ll still be smart.” That never worked out, though, as she’s frozen forever in beauty, and I get dumber with each passing year.
We had strong beliefs in mediums and psychics, and had been told by them over time that we had some undeveloped abilities in this arena: to read others, to be “empaths” as it’s known. This has come in handy since her death. I have spoken to three different psychics since she passed away, all with significant results. These talented mediums are able to speak directly to my sister and to me as though she is standing right beside them. In fact, she is.
Those who don’t believe in the abilities of psychic mediums haven’t been open to such an experience, haven’t tried it, or haven’t been able to have a loved one so readily available. My sister is, unsurprisingly to me, very close to our world in a place where she is easily accessible and communicative. A medium, not knowing anything about her, talks about details of her life that are being shared with her by my sister, who shows her a graduation cap and a blank diploma; her only regret was not finishing the master’s degree she had nearly completed. The medium asks me about a boy in photos with a baseball bat: that’s her son.
My recent experiences with reiki have been very inspirational. I’ve started meditating more and am considering taking reiki class myself. There’s an incredible amount of healing that goes on through this process. The definition of reiki is “a healing technique based on the principle that the therapist can channel energy into the patient by means of touch, to activate the natural healing processes of the patient's body and restore physical and emotional well-being.” I know, a lot of people think it sounds like a lot of hippie mumbo-jumbo and honestly, I would’ve thought the same thing myself until I actually experienced it a few times. Now I’m a believer. The body, mind and spirit have abilities to heal themselves and reiki is just a tool to allowing our bodies to do that, which fascinates me and is truly helping me so whatever works, right?
My reiki master massage therapist is tapped into the spiritual world enough that she’s also a talented psychic medium, so when I visited her the other day, which coincidentally was my sister’s birthday, it turned out my sister was very much in the room with me and she did an unscheduled reading, which was kind of her and helpful for me.
The reminder that my sister is always with me, that she can hear me, and that I can talk to her is comforting. So I continue, open-minded, as always, toward learning more about not only my relationship with my sister who has passed over, but with those who are still here in the world around me.
